Generally, in a wireless communication system, wireless terminals communicate with each other through a base station. In this case, a medium access control (MAC) method for shared radio resources and a radio resource allocation method are defined between the base station and the respective wireless terminals.
A conventional resource allocation method of a wireless communication system will now be described.
The respective wireless terminals request resources from the base station when the terminals have data to be transmitted to the base station. Then, the base station considers the resource allocation request of the wireless terminals and transmission data of the base station and allocates the resources to the wireless terminals.
The wireless terminals transmit the data to the base station after receiving the resources. In this case, the base station determines whether an error occurs in the transmission data, and when an error is determined to have occurred, the base station informs the wireless terminal of a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) feedback channel or information on the error.
The wireless terminal receiving the HARQ feedback channel or information on the error requests the resources from the base station, and the base station allocates the resources requested by the wireless terminal. A control channel for resource allocation is used to transmit information on the resource allocation from the base station to the wireless terminal, and the control channel for the resource allocation is additionally used to allocate resources requested by the wireless terminal.
To prevent this resource waste, resources are persistently allocated when it is required to persistently transmit/receive data, and resources allocated at predetermined times are used without additional resource allocation or a resource request control channel after resource allocation information is transmitted through a resource allocation control channel once or a minimum number of times.
A persistent resource allocation process will now be described with reference to FIG. 1. FIG. 1 is a diagram of a conventional resource allocation process and a feedback channel of a wireless communication system.
As shown in FIG. 1, when the wireless terminal receives a feedback of HARQ NACK N from the base station after transmitting first data D1, the wireless terminal uses previously received resources to transmit second data D2 having the same information as the first data D1.
In addition, when receiving the feedback of HARQ NACK N from the base station again, the wireless terminal uses persistently allocated resources to transmit third data D3 having the same information as the first data D1.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.